By Paul Brooks
Times Herald-Record
January 17, 2008
Hal Turner stalked in front of Kingston High School with his neo-Nazi supporters in 2005, tossing white-power taunts at counter-demonstrators.
That was just part of his legacy. He railed against President Bush and Jews, too. He handed out the private addresses of New Jersey Supreme Court justices.
But some government agencies are OK if you work for them — and Turner apparently did.
He was an FBI informant, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that monitors hate groups and extremists.
According to the center, hackers confronted Turner on his Web site Jan. 1 and told him they had broken into Turner's computer server.
What they found were e-mails between Turner and an FBI agent who was apparently Turner's handler. The unidentified hackers posted a July 7 e-mail to the agent. In it, Turner gave the agent a message from someone threatening to kill Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, the center said in a story on its Web site, www.splcenter.org.
"Once again," Turner wrote to the agent, "my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy."
When the e-mails hit a neo-Nazi Web site, Turner shut down his own Web site. "I hereby separate from the "pro-White" movement. I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it," Turner said.
Yesterday, Turner said the only thing he can say about the FBI allegation is "no comment." The FBI hasn't commented, either.
The center's Mark Potok didn't object to the FBI's use of informants in general. "There is no question these are groups in many, many cases that really do need infiltrating, but ... this goes way over the line. It is like a game of Russian roulette and we are the bait."
Kingston Mayor Jim Sottile was dumbfounded by the revelation of Turner's FBI informant status. "You can't make this stuff up," the mayor said.
Maybe Turner was acting all the time, Sottile said. "But it wasn't an act when he had this whole community in an uproar and cost us $80,000."
No comments:
Post a Comment