De facto martial law

[anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com]

Assoc. Press, 28-Jul-1996

Federal investigators reported "very good leads" Sunday in
the hunt for the Olympic bomber, and the Georgia National Guard mobilized 
fresh troops to add muscle to the force protecting against a repeat attack. 

[...]

Huge crowds, including more than 80,000 at the stadium, seemed 
undeterred by tougher security screening and fears of terrorism. 
   
"The more they check us, the happier I am," Nancy Hudgins, of Stone
Mountain, Ga., said at a handball game in the Georgia Congress Center. 

[...]


The Georgia state government said it would dispatch by Monday morning 
an additional National Guard infantry battalion, the 121st from Macon, to
supplement the civilian bag-searchers, metal-detector operators and guards 
at Atlanta Olympic sites. 
   
About 4,000 guardsmen are already deployed on any one day here. The
battalion would add "a few hundred" to that contingent, government 
spokesmen said. 
   
The civilian, police and military security army on hand here totals some
30,000. The White House said Sunday about 900 FBI agents are now assigned 
to Olympic duty. 

[...]


27-Jul-1996

The Olympics turned into an armed encampment Saturday, police and 
soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs everywhere, all athletes and fans
subject to search, the free spirit of the Summer Games suddenly gone. 
   
The bomb that killed a woman and injured more than 100 people, among the
thousands jolted at a rock concert in Centennial Olympic Park at 1:25 a.m.,
instantly transformed the Games into fields of fear. 
   
Sentries wielding machine guns and rifles guarded gates and patrolled
buildings from basements to rooftops. Officers conducted meticulous 
searches of vehicles, checking under them with extended mirrors the way a 
dentist probes for cavities. 

[...]

Security, already on high alert since the TWA Flight 800 explosion, became
more visible all over. Soldiers carrying machine guns scout[ed] the 
rowing site at Lake Lanier, in normal times a peaceful recreational 
community.


Reuters, 07/28 

Olympics-FBI search man's home in bomb hunt, paper

A man from rural north Georgia says the FBI searched his home for 
clues to the weekend bombing at Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, 
a newspaper reported on Sunday.
     
The Daily Citizen-News of Dalton quoted 41-year-old Terry Roper of Rocky
Face, Georgia, as saying that investigators showed up at his remote 
country home on Saturday and searched the house, the yard and his vehicles 
with bomb-sniffing dogs.

[...]
     
The federal agents left after the search, telling the man they would be in
touch, the newspaper said.
 
[...]

"I was home here all night long. I haven't been to Atlanta in a year or
so," it quoted Roper as saying. He said he knows nothing about bomb-making.

[...]
     
The newspaper said police were acting on an anonymous tip phoned into its
circulation department by an unidentified caller.
     
Roper told the newspaper he believed the call stemmed from a workplace
conversation about precautions against terrorism at Olympic venues.
     
"I never have mentioned nothing about making a bomb, blowing anything 
up or anything like that. I don't know how to make a bomb," he was quoted 
as saying.

  
07/28 
 
Olympics-Militia group condemns attack, calls it ...


An extreme rightwing Georgia militia on Sunday denied responsibility 
for an explosion at the Atlanta Olympics in which two people died, 
and a member held on previous bomb charges called it a cowardly
act.
     
J.J. Johnson, a co-founder of the "112th Regiment Militia-at-Large for the
Republic of Georgia" told a news conference they were angry over press
suggestions that they planted the pipe bomb among Olympic revellers early 
on Saturday.
     
"We categorically deny having any knowledge of this or anything to do with
this," he said.
     
"Atlanta now looks like a virtual police state, which is something the
patriots and militia have fought against. Why would we do something to bring
that about?" said Johnson, a radio talk show host who moved to Georgia from
Ohio.

[...]
     
Johnson and militia attorney Nancy Lord offered to assist the FBI by
providing investigators with names of potential bomb-makers from around the
state.
     
The names turned out to belong to informants for the federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) [...]

     
"They're the only people we know of in the Georgia area who like to talk
about pipe bombs, who like to build pipe bombs," said Lord [...]