Giving in to bomber sets dangerous precedent
HAD the Washington Post carried the exclusive first interview with Nicole Brown Simpson beyond the grave, or brought down the Clinton administration with a neo-Watergate scoop, it could barely have expected a reaction such as this.
After a couple of hours of going on sale, there was barely a copy of Tuesday's Post to be found in the District of Columbia or the rest of the country. Vending machines stood empty, newsstands had sold out and even the racks in neighbourhood liquor stores were lacking. The 'exclusive' that brought on the rare buying frenzy? An eight-page pullout section carrying a 35,000-word article - lengthy even by the Post 's standards - entitled, 'Industrial society and its future'.
Probably never in the history of Western media could so many thousands of people have been so eager to read an erudite, if rather dull excuse for a master's thesis. In the instant-news era of OJ Simpson and Oprah, the thought is almost surreal. But then, not many psychopathic serial killers manage to get their manifestos published in a national newspaper.
Of course, the author of the piece was the 'Unabomber', the elusive anti-technology neurotic who for nearly two decades terrorised the nation with a campaign of mainly letter-bombing, which has so far claimed three lives and injured 23 people. With only an out-of-date artist's impression to show for thousands of man-hours on the case, the FBI has put together a profile of a white male in his 40s, probably a graduate of a sociology-type college course, and now a loner living somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area.
From some of the bomber's past targets - computer and airline company executives, and computer science academics - they also guessed he had some grudge against modern technology. That hunch proved correct when the bomber last year became bolder and started sending explanatory letters to newspapers. It emerged the Unabomber, despite his calm, precise language, was the most murderous Luddite of the 20th century.
When, perhaps in the fallout from the Oklahoma bomb publicity, he demanded his manifesto be published in a national newspaper or he would kill again, few could have suspected he would prevail.
But there it was: as the Unabomber sat down with his raisin bran in his Bay Area hideaway on Tuesday morning, he could read his own words in full academic detail. Published with the collaboration of The New York Times, the work indeed seems to be by a well-read psycho; at one point he even quotes Sun Yat-sen and other Nationalist thinkers on the nature of human freedom.