Update: Tip on fugitive charged in 1970 UW bombing doesn't pan out
Leo Burt, one of the four people who bombed the Army Math Research Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on Aug. 24, 1970 during the height of anti-war protests is the subject of buzz that the DoJ and FBI are honing in on his whereabouts.
From this morning's Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), Ed Treleven reports:
If something is stirring in the case of Leo Burt, missing for decades after he allegedly took part in a Vietnam-era bombing on the University of Wisconsin campus, federal prosecutors and the FBI weren 't saying on Monday.
But on Friday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Grant Johnson filed a motion in Burt 's long-dormant federal criminal case seeking somebody 's fingerprints. The sealed motion, filed in the dusty case that has been pending against Burt since 1970, is titled "Application for Production of Fingerprints. "
Johnson said he couldn 't elaborate on what was contained in the motion. "If I could I wouldn't have had it sealed, " he said Monday.
Some who have followed the case, however, said it could mean that authorities want fingerprints from someone close to the case, possibly someone suspected of being Burt himself.
The bomb, made of more than a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer soaked in fuel oil and delivered in a van, ripped apart the UW physics department in the basement and first floor of Sterling Hall and killed 33-year-old physics researcher Robert Fassnacht.
The Armstrongs and Fine were convicted and punished for their roles in the bombing. Burt, however, has never been found and his fate remains a topic of speculation among those who lived in Madison at the time and followed the anti-war movement.
Leo Burt was the only one of the four who has escaped the U.S. government's pursuit of the perpetrators of the bombing, which inadvertently resulted in the tragic killing on a researcher working in the early morning.
I say the DoJ has a bit too much time on its hands.
If criminal violence during the Vietnam War period is really a concern of the government, there are many possible targets who served in the Johnson and Nixon administrations that perpetrated this criminal war under false pretenses and myriad misrepresentations made to the American people.
You want to go after them?
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Thanks. This is a topic that has frosted my shorts for 38 years, and I was just a small child when it happened.
ReplyDeleteI'm so sick of the later generation of Foxxoid News Bimbos and NeoRighties flapping their ultra white teeth over this one.
They should all be required to spend ten years tending to people with third-degree burns. Maybe then they'd be qualified to talk about whether or not napalm was a bigger crime than blowing a corner off a building.
As usual, all those brown deaths don't matter one bit--never mind the FBI/CIA-backed assassinations of law-abiding people in the US and other nations. One measly white guy with a Ph.D. gets killed by accident (and if he was such a fabulous wonderful dad and husband, why wasn't he home taking care of his family at that hour?), and it's suddenly some huge crime.
People die all the time. People are killed. For economic reasons. For political reasons. Just because. But somehow a Madison Ph.D. guy is more valuable than millions of others.
I'm so sick of people who, for instance, center their comfy little Madison lives around fossil energy, while shrieking No Blood For Oil. As though every mile they drive doesn't exact an endless toll of death.
We're all in this life and death game together. A little less sacrosanctitude. Leo Burt and his compadres were drawing attention to a filthy reality in Madison: the use of public moneys, and public universities, to commit genocide and ecocide. Nothing less than a bomb would get the attention of the prosperous class, which hung out in Berkeley and Madison and elsewhere, riding that military industrial suburban white flight gravy train.
So because the victim was a white guy with a Ph.D, his life is somehow "less?"
ReplyDeleteIf the poster (anonymous, of course) had said the same thing about the victim being a black guy, people would be screaming for his head. Justifiably.
Racism is ugly no matter where it originates. The victim's family grieves no less because he's white and educated.