Unabomber wants writings intact for public to read/Government wants to clean papers for auction

"Make note of the point in blue-- it equates to governmental history revisions."--Jammer

Jan. 21, 2007, 10:27PM
TOP STORY
Unabomber wants writings kept intact for public to read
Government wants to clean up papers for auction

By SERGE KOVALESKI
New York Times

Nine years after he began serving a life sentence for the Unabomber crimes, Theodore J. Kaczynski is fighting to reclaim more than 40,000 pages of his writings and correspondence so he can preserve them in their rawest form for the public to read.

Kaczynski, 64, is in a legal battle with the federal government and a group of his victims over the future of the handwritten papers, which include journals, diaries and drafts of his anti-technology manifesto.

Suffering of victims

The journals contain blunt assessments of 16 mail bombings between 1978 to 1995 that killed three people and injured 28, as well as his musings on the suffering of victims and their families. The government wants to auction sanitized versions of the materials on the Internet to raise money for four of Kaczynski's victims.

But, citing the First Amendment, Kaczynski has argued in court filings that the government is not entitled to his writings and has no right to alter them. The writings were among the items taken from his remote Montana cabin after his arrest in April 1996. In a motion drafted in pen, he said he planned to argue that the government had too much discretion under a federal restitution law to confiscate writings.

The four victims pursuing restitution from Kaczynski initially were reluctant to agree to the auction, fearing it could ghoulishly generate more notoriety for him. But some were equally horrified by the prospect of Kaczynski reclaiming his writings.

One of the victims, Gary Wright, a computer-store employee seriously injured in an attack 20 years ago next month, said it was difficult for the four to reach a consensus.

"How do you take four people and try to come to an agreement when they have been wronged in different ways and are in different stages of healing with different types of losses?" said Wright, now a businessman in Salt Lake City. "I'm sure that emotions were running rampant and that people were reliving it."

Hope to destroy papers

Kaczynski came to be known as the Unabomber after the FBI's code name for the case, Unabom, coined because the targets included universities and airlines.

One victim who is not seeking restitution, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, said in a letter to the court that he hoped "the criminal's property will be destroyed, or (if need be) sealed for a century at least and then made available at no charge to scholars of depravity."