Senior Policy Advisor convicted of conspiring to bomb a San Diego abortion clinic in 1988

By Joan McCarter / Daily Kos

The group behind the falsified videos attacking Planned Parenthood calls itself a “group of citizen journalists,” but is of course not actually journalists. What the so-called Center for Medical Progress really is is a group of committed anti-abortion activists with close ties to “some of the country’s hardest-line anti-abortion extremists,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The group’s leader and one of the actors in the videos is David Daleiden, “who was previously the director of research for Live Action News.” Live Action also produced falsified Planned Parenthood videos, in a failed effort to bring the organization down. But it’s the board members of CMP that have the strongest ties to extremist groups.

A CMP board member, Troy Newman, is also the president of Operation Rescue, a hard-line anti-abortion group that boasted of aiding the CMP “investigation” with advice and material support and has demanded “criminal prosecutions of Planned Parenthood officials.”

In 2003, Newman issued a press release attacking “judicial tyranny” in the prosecution of Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor and his bodyguard in Florida, and arguing that Hill, who was executed the same day, should have been able to present a defense of “justifiable defensive action.” A 2004 Los Angeles Times story described Newman shadowing clinic workers and seeking “not just to make their lives uncomfortable” but also to “disgust their friends and associates.” […]

A second CMP board member is Albin Rhomberg, who The Daily Beast described as having “a long and strident history of anti-abortion activism.” One woman told the publication that Rhomberg followed her “for an entire city block, barely three feet away, filming and shouting at me about my evil work at Planned Parenthood.”

Operation Rescue people seem to loom large around CMP, including Senior Policy Advisor Cheryl Sullenger. You might remember Sullenger because she was convicted of conspiring to bomb a San Diego abortion clinic in 1988. She was sentenced to three years in prison for providing the “gunpowder and other material for the bomb and [giving] a wig to the man who actually planted it.” Sullenger is a big cheerleader for CMP, and “has written repeatedly about CMP’s videos and even provided a link to its press release about one of them.”

The videos are not journalism, they’re propaganda. They’re intended to inflame political opposition—at the very least—to Planned Parenthood. If a few people just happen to get the idea from watching these videos that they have to save “babies” with some more bombs, CMP will surely declare that they aren’t responsible.