To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case

By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA — For years the largely white staff of Georgia Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, tried to tackle the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions. But, staff members said, they found it difficult to make inroads with black audiences.

So in 2009, the group took money that it normally used for advertising a pregnancy hot line and hired a black woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator.

Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.

The idea resonated, said Nancy Smith, the executive director.

“We were shocked when we spent less money and had more phone calls” to the hot line, Ms. Smith said.

This month, the group expanded its reach, making national news with 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species,” and a Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com.

Across the country, the anti-abortion movement, long viewed as almost exclusively white and Republican, is turning its attention to African-Americans and encouraging black abortion opponents across the country to become more active.

A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Tex., meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organizations.

Black abortion opponents, who sometimes refer to abortions as “womb lynchings,” have mounted a sustained attack on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spurred by a sting operation by young white conservatives who taped Planned Parenthood employees welcoming donations specifically for aborting black children.

“What’s giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what’s going down,” said Johnny M. Hunter, a black pastor and longtime abortion opponent in Fayetteville, N.C. “The game changes when blacks get involved. And in the pro-life movement, a lot of the groups that have been ignored for years, they’re now getting galvanized.”

The factors fueling the focus on black women — an abortion rate far higher than that of other races and the ties between the effort to legalize and popularize birth control and eugenics — are, at heart, old news. But they have been given exaggerated new life by the Internet, slick repackaging, high production values and money, like the more than $20,000 that Georgia Right to Life invested in the billboards.

Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women.

Day Gardner, now the president of the National Black Pro-Life Union in Washington, said those figures shocked her at first.

“I just really assumed that white people aborted more than anyone else, and black people would not do this because we’re culturally a religious people, we have large families,” Ms. Gardner said.

Many black anti-abortion leaders, including Ms. Davis and Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the director of African-American outreach for Priests for Life, often recount their own abortion histories (each woman had two).

Abortion opponents say the number is so high because abortion clinics are deliberately located in black neighborhoods and prey upon black women. The evidence, they say, is everywhere: Planned Parenthood’s response to the anti-abortion ad that aired during the Super Bowl featured two black athletes, they note, and several women’s clinics offered free services — including abortions — to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina.

“The more I dug into it, the more vast I found that the network was,” Ms. Davis said. “And I realized that African-American women just did not know the truth, they did not understand the truth about the abortion industry.”

But those who support abortion rights dispute the conspiracy theory, saying it portrays black women as dupes and victims. The reason black women have so many abortions is simple, they say: too many unwanted pregnancies.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Loretta Ross, the executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, listing a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence. “There’s an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it’s because of voluntary activity, and it’s so not the case,” Ms. Ross said.

But, she said, the idea that abortion is intended to wipe out blacks may be finding fertile ground in a population that has experienced so much sanctioned prejudice and violence.

Black opponents of abortion are fond of saying that black people were anti-abortion and anti-birth control early on, pointing to Marcus Garvey’s conviction that blacks could overcome white supremacy through reproduction, and black militants who protested family planning clinics.

But that is only half the picture, scholars say. Black women were eager for birth control even before it was popularized by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and black doctors who provided illegal abortions were lauded as community heroes.

“Some male African-American leaders were so furious about what they perceived as genocidal intentions that in one case they burned down a clinic,” said Carole Joffe, the author of “Dispatches From the Abortion Wars.” “But women were very resolute, saying, ‘We want birth control.’ ”

In 2008, Lila Rose, a college student at U.C.L.A. and the founder of an anti-abortion group called Live Action, released four audio recordings of a man trying to make donations to Planned Parenthood clinics to pay for black women’s abortions. In one, the caller, played by James O’Keefe III, the provocateur recently arrested on charges that he tried to tamper with the telephones of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said, “You know, we just think, the less black kids out there, the better,” to which the Planned Parenthood employee replies, “Understandable, understandable.”

Planned Parenthood has apologized for the employees’ statements and says they do not reflect the organization’s values or policies.

The recordings led to calls by black leaders to withdraw financing of Planned Parenthood, which receives about $350 million a year in government money for education and medical services. They reinvigorated old claims that the organization was a front for racial genocide and that Sanger viewed blacks as undesirable.

Scholars acknowledge that Sanger did ally herself with eugenics, at the time a mainstream movement, but said she believed that birth control, sterilization and abortion should be voluntary and not based on race. She was also allied with black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. King, who praised her efforts to bring birth control to black families.

“It’s unfair to characterize those efforts as racially targeted in a negative way,” said Ellen Chesler, a historian and Sanger biographer, who is now on the board of Planned Parenthood.

Still, enough threads of truth weave through the theory to make “Maafa 21,” the documentary whose name is a Swahili word used to refer to the slavery era, persuasive to some viewers, at least at a recent screening at Morris Brown College, a historically black institution in Atlanta.

“Before we saw the movie, I was pro-choice,” said Markita Eddy, a sophomore. But were she to get pregnant now, Ms. Eddy said, “it showed me that maybe I should want to keep my child no matter what my position was, just because of the conspiracy.”

British Court Convicts Three in Plot to Blow Up Airliners - NYTimes.com

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By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON — After two trials and the largest counterterrorism investigation in Britain’s history, three men were found guilty on Monday of plotting to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners on a single day with liquid explosives smuggled aboard in soft-drink bottles and detonated by devices powered with AA batteries.

The convictions came three years after the global airline industry was thrown into chaos by the plot. The bombers’ plan to drain plastic soft-drink bottles with syringes and refill them with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a bleaching agent also used as a propellant for rockets, led to new measures prohibiting passengers from carrying all but small quantities of liquids and creams onto flights.

With those measures still in force and causing backups at airport security checkpoints around the world, the police and intelligence agencies in Britain and the United States had waited anxiously for verdicts in the six-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court in London, where eight men were accused of conspiracy to stage the airliner bombings.

Prosecutors said the plot could have killed at least 1,500 people aboard the targeted planes, which by that measure would have made it second only to the Sept. 11 attacks as the most serious terrorist plot in modern history.

“Apart from massive loss of life, these attacks would have had enormous worldwide economic and political significance,” John McDowall, Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism chief, said after the verdicts.

In Washington, the Obama administration praised the verdict on Monday.

“British authorities have worked diligently to investigate and prosecute those involved in the 2006 aviation plot,” Mike Hammer, a National Security Council spokesman, said via e-mail. “We congratulate them on those efforts and extend our thanks to the British government for seeing these efforts through to today’s conclusion.”

Last year, a trial failed to reach verdicts on the airliner-bombing charges against the defendants then being tried. So the stakes were especially high in the second trial for the main agencies involved in uncovering the London plot, including Scotland Yard and Britain’s secret intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, as well as the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I., among American agencies involved.

The significance was all the greater because there have been no trials yet of anyone directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

After arrests in the liquid-explosives case were made in August 2006, documents found at the plotters’ homes and on a computer memory stick belonging to the plot ringleader showed that they had earmarked airline schedules for seven flights leaving London for New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto, with aircraft operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada. Evidence at the trial showed that the plot aimed to detonate the bombs nearly simultaneously, with the aircraft over the Atlantic.

The plotters’ intent, intelligence officials said, was to show that security measures adopted after Sept. 11 were insufficient to foil the kind of low-technology, “asymmetric” attacks favored by Islamic extremists in their war with the West. Evidence at the London trial showed that several of the plotters, like those of Sept. 11, had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan for indoctrination and training by extremist groups linked to Al Qaeda.

The jury found three men guilty of conspiring to kill passengers and crew members aboard the flights: Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, named by prosecutors as the plot’s ringleader; Tanvir Hussain, 28; and Assad Sarwar, 29, who was identified at the trial as the “quartermaster” of the plot, responsible for acquiring the explosives, detonators and other equipment and assembling them at a “bomb factory” in a London suburb.

A total of eight men were in the dock during the six-month trial. Four of the eight — Ibrahim Savant, 28; Arafat Waheed Khan, 28; Waheed Zaman, 25; and Donald Stewart-Whyte, 23 — were found not guilty of plotting to bomb the airliners. The eighth man, Umar Islam, 31, was found guilty of an alternative charge of conspiracy to commit murder, the charge on which Mr. Ali, Mr. Hussain and Mr. Sarwar were convicted at the first trial that ended in September 2008.

The men who were convicted will be sentenced Monday.

The jury in the second trial failed to reach a verdict on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder in the case of Mr. Savant, Mr. Khan and Mr. Zaman. It acquitted Mr. Stewart-Whyte, who was said by defense lawyers at the trial to have converted from Christianity to Islam only four months before his arrest.

The Crown Prosecution Service, responsible for filing charges in criminal cases, said after the verdicts that it would review the jury’s failure to reach verdicts in the three cases of conspiracy to commit murder, and decide whether to seek a third trial in the case.

Scotland Yard officials estimated the total cost of the case at more than $60 million, another factor that weighed heavily as the verdicts came in. Over the weekend, there had been fears the trial would end, like the first, with a hung jury on the key charges of plotting to bomb airliners. As the jury reached the end of a second week of deliberations, the judge called the jurors into court on Friday and told them he would accept 10-to-2 majority verdicts if they were unable to reach unanimous decisions, allowable under British law.

Behind the scenes, the case caused major strains between American and British intelligence agencies and investigators. The Americans were deeply involved from the start because of the role that American electronic intercepts played in uncovering the plot, and because the principal targets were American planes and passengers.

But officials familiar with the case said there were bitter disputes over the arrests in 2006, with the Americans saying they believed that the British, who staked out the conspirators for months, waited too long to round them up, raising the risk of an attack. The British, by contrast, were angered by the American pressure, which they said forced them to make the arrests before they had all the evidence necessary to ensure convictions.

A major stumbling block at both trials was that British court procedures do not allow the use of intercepted telephone conversations and other electronic intercepts. Television documentaries shown in Britain have included secret police videotapes showing some of the plotters engaged in what appeared to be preparatory work on the bombs at the suburban London bomb factory and discussing the destructive potential of the bombs.

Mr. Ali and several other defendants testified at the trial that they had never intended to bomb airliners, but planned what they called “a political stunt,” involving setting off minor explosions in garbage bins outside airline offices in Terminal Three of Heathrow airport, the London base for the three airlines they earmarked in the flight schedules. Their purpose, they said, was to frighten people, not to kill them.

But experiments by British explosives experts cited in court found that the bombs the plotters planned to use could blow aircraft apart at 30,000 feet.

Prosecutors showed the court extensive evidence showing how the men bought material for the bombs, and how some of it, including the hydrogen peroxide, was hidden in woods outside a town northwest of London. The jury was also shown so-called martyrdom videos prepared by two of the plotters, Mr. Ali and Mr. Hussain.

A common theme in the videos was exacting revenge on Britain and the United States for their interference in Muslim countries, especially the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We have warned you enough,” Mr. Ali said. “We have warned you again and again to leave our lands.” In his video, Mr. Hussain said his only regret was that “I can’t come back and do this again and again until people come to their senses and realize, ‘Don’t mess with the Muslims.’ ”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.