On Thursday, the Wichita Eagle ran a cover story about Dr. Mila Means, 54, who told the paper she plans to form a nonprofit andt raise around $1 million to open a clinic that will provide “early-term abortions.”

Before noon, Wichita-based anti-abortion-rights group Operation Rescue posted an article titled “Bizarre Admissions From Abortionist Means Reveal Lack of Ethics and Morality.”

The Wichita Eagle story begins:

Dr. Mila Means was raised in a family that considered abortion an accepted, reasonable idea. Her schoolteacher parents, social activists in the 1960s, instilled that attitude early in her life. … That upbringing, and what she calls a non-mainstream approach to her medical practice and her personal life, guided the decision she made about a year ago to try to perform abortions in a city that hasn’t had an abortion clinic since physician George Tiller was murdered by Scott Roeder in May 2009.

The Operation Rescue story digs into Means’ quotes about her financial debt and business skills.

“It looks like Means is trying to used a non-profit corporation as a tax dodge,” says Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “Her financial turmoil and history of a failed practice likely precludes her from obtaining business capital through the traditional, legal means. With her admitted history of financial mismanagement coupled with her dubious scheme to raise money, donors seriously risk throwing their money away by giving to her.”

About the new abortion-clinic regulations adopted in Kansas, Means is quoted in theEagle as saying:

“There are so many redundancies that are not important for the woman’s safety that are built into this bill specifically to deny access, and that really makes me angry. That probably reinforced my decision to keep working in this direction.”

OR’s response on its web site:

Means also has a problem with authority, according to her interview. She has refused to meet quotas imposed on her by employers and denounces what she calls “cookie-cutter protocol.” This raises questions about her ability to comply with new state safety laws that she says angers her and contain “many redundancies that are not important.” The new law “probably reinforced my decision to keep working in this direction,” she said.

Newman calls Means “a danger to the public,” then digs into her personal life, on display in a section sub-headed “Her private life is unconventional.” The picture the Eagle paints of Means is as follows: She has no children and lives with her boyfriend. In 2003, she married a gay man because he was a close friend with bipolar depression and needed health insurance; they are still married, but the husband does not live with Means but with another gay man. Also, she continued to treat her husband and provide treatment for his mother and grandmother after they married, which led to discipline from the Kansas Board of Healing Arts in 2007.

OR does not approve of Means’ marriage or her cohabitation with her boyfriend:

When taken in total, Means’ checkered background and history of bucking authority and the law raises deep concerns about her moral center and ability to conduct herself in keeping with legal and ethical standards.

In the Wichita Eagle story, Newman said: “We’re going to do everything legally and morally within our power to keep her from opening an abortion clinic in this city. And she cannot underestimate our resolve.”

Already, Newman has claimed credit for shutting down her efforts to find a clinic so far and has estimated that she has less than a 30 percent chance of ever opening a clinic — on account of the new abortion legislation and Operation Rescue’s actions, which include the article in published attacking Means’ ethics and morality.

As The Florida Independent recently reported, Operation Rescue has started a research project to identify every abortion provider in the country. The group is looking for names of providers, which clinics they work at, as well as all documentation “concerning board discipline, criminal history, malpractice cases, verifiable botched abortions and other similar information.” Once all the information is compiled, the information will go up on Operation Rescue’s website.

The research project and next month’s “Summer of Mercy 2.0” suggest Operation Rescue shift in priorities from the 2011 legislative session to trying to prosecute abortion-providers.

Here’s how the pregnant reader learned that her fetus had a likely fatal brain deformity, just one day after the time limit beyond which most doctors will no longer perform an abortion:

Our appointment began jovially. The perinatologist and nurse joked about names, and at one point, the doctor called the baby a “little rascal.” As the ultrasound continued, the room grew quiet. The perinatologist scanned the baby’s head again and again. He finally announced, in a solemn voice, “I’m seeing some things in the baby’s brain that concern me.” Time stopped, and everything in the universe shifted. Holding my partner’s hand, I struggled to listen despite the thick blanket of grief that settled over the room.

The doctor continued, “The baby has holoprosencephaly. It’s a brain malformation in which the forebrain fails to divide. Most of these babies die before term. Those that are born have severe disabilities.” He finally took a deep sigh and started to deliver the especially delicate part: “I don’t know what your beliefs are but some people would terminate a pregnancy of this nature. Since you are 22 weeks along, you would have to go to Wichita for the procedure.” Everyone in the room knew this was shorthand for, “You would have to see George Tiller, the infamous late-term abortion doctor. No one else will help you at this point.” Numb, I asked to know the baby’s gender. He placed the ultrasound wand back on my stomach and read the grainy image: “It’s a girl.” We walked out of the clinic with blank stares and wept in the car.

Read the rest of the excerpt here.

Meanwhile, if a Muslim immigrant gets stopped on a traffic violation, his car gets searched and he’s immediately arrested for having fireworks in the trunk, investigated by the FBI and held for nine months as a suspected terrorist, only to be re-arrested by immigration authorities after he’s acquitted of the criminal charges. (I’ll have more on that later today.)

But if a white guy from Kansas with ties to right-wing militia groups violates federal law by repeatedly threatening and vandalizing an abortion clinic, nothing happens?

That’s what Rachel Maddow reported on her show last night, featuring a surprising interview with the security guard at the Wichita clinic who called the FBI about Roeder’s crimes — repeatedly.

The FBI reportedly said that it couldn’t do anything about it without first convening a grand jury.

Photo by: SMN, Flickr Creative Common

The threats started in 1995. It was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the American Coalition of Life Activists decided to create a poster for their annual meeting listing the names and address of a group of doctors who performed abortions. They called them “the Deadly Dozen,” and declared each guilty of “crimes against humanity.” They offered $5,000 for information leading to their arrest, conviction, or revocation of their medical licenses. ACLA members distributed the poster at the group’s events and published it in an affiliated magazine.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Then later that year, ACLA unveiled a second poster, this time targeting Dr. Robert Crist, an abortion provider in Kansas City. The poster listed his home and work addresses and featured his photograph. It offered $500 to “any ACLA organization that successfully persuades Crist to turn from his child killing through activities within ACLA guidelines,” which prohibited violence.

The following January, ACLA created the “Nuremberg Files” — a series of dossiers it had compiled on doctors, clinic employees, politicians, judges and other abortion rights supporters. Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kans., who was killed Sunday, was among them. They would be prosecuted, ACLA wrote, “once the tide of this nation’s opinion turns against the wanton slaughter of God’s children.” ACLA sent copies of the dossiers to an anti-abortion activist who posted the information on a Website. There, the names of those who had been attacked by “anti-abortion terrorists” — as the court called them — were listed, with a strike through the names of those who had been murdered. The names of those wounded were grayed.

Although neither the posters nor the Website contained explicit threats against the doctors, similar posters had previously been made of other doctors shortly before they were violently attacked; one was murdered. Abortion providers soon took to wearing bulletproof vests, drew the curtains of their home windows and received protection from U.S. Marshals. The strategy had worked.

Eventually, some of the doctors, represented by Planned Parenthood, sued ACLA, twelve activists and an affiliated organization, claiming that their actions violated the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE act, among other laws. At trial, a jury found that the statements were “true threats” and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. The doctors won $107 million in damages and an injunction barring the anti-abortion activists from distributing similar information in the future.

Although the anti-abortion protesters appealed, a majority of judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict. Such “WANTED”- style posters, the court ruled, in the context of previous similar threats and subsequent violence, and the lines drawn through the names of doctors who’d been murdered, were not protected by the First Amendment: “ACLA’s conduct amounted to a true threat and is not protected speech.” The Supreme Court declined to review the case, and it remains good law.

Much of the discussion in the wake of Tiller’s slaying has been about criminal prosecution of those who murder abortion doctors. But there’s a growing concern about the anti-abortion extremists — some call them domestic terrorists — who enable and encourage such murders by labeling abortion providers “mass murderers”, Nazis and worse, and implying that violent attacks against them are not only justified, but honorable.

As Rachel Maddow revealed in chilling detail in her MSNBC news show on Monday night, groups such as Rescue America, Prayer and Action News, Army of God and Operation Rescue Founder Randall Terry all appeared to be celebrating Tiller’s murder on Monday. And while extremists who promote violence against abortion providers could be prosecuted under state and federal law — and particularly under the federal FACE Act — the federal government in recent years has hardly prosecuted any such cases.

According to statistics provided by the Department of Justice, the Bush administration brought only about two criminal prosecutions per year in the entire country under the FACE Act , and never more than four in any single year. The Clinton administration, in contrast, prosecuted 17 defendants for violations of the FACE Act in 1997 alone, and an average of about 10 per year since the law was enacted in 1994. Those cases included one against a woman in 1996 who yelled through a bullhorn to a doctor, “Robert, remember Dr. Gunn. This could happen to you …”, referring to Dr. David Gunn, the first abortion doctor ever murdered, in 1993. In another case, a man who parked a Ryder truck outside a clinic shortly after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, where a Ryder truck had been used to carry explosives, was found to have threatened force. Stalking, arson and bomb threats are also illegal.

Whether the dropoff in prosecutions is because the FACE Act successfully deterred crimes after its enactment or because the Bush administration wasn’t interested in prosecuting them is not clear. “The amount of activity really did drop a lot after FACE was enacted and it was beginning to be enforced,” said Cathleen Mahoney, Executive Vice President of the National Abortion Federation who was an attorney in the Justice Department until 2006. “Certainly the political will wasn’t there.”

That’s disappointed Janet Crepps, deputy director of the legal program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I don’t think that the government has done enough,” she said, noting that while the Clinton administration had created a task force in the Department of Justice to coordinate responses to clinic threats and violence, during the Bush years, “we’ve heard that providers during that time would call DOJ for help and get no response.”

Justice Department spokesman Alejandro Miyar said Tuesday that the task force still exists, and in a statement released after the fatal shooting of Dr. Tiller, Attorney General Eric Holder said that “[f]ederal law enforcement is coordinating with local law enforcement officials in Kansas on the investigation of this crime.” It remains to be seen, however, whether the government will also investigate the anti-abortion activists who threaten abortion providers and may have worked with the actual murderer.

But as the Planned Parenthood case illustrates, the doctors and clinic workers who are targets of violent threats don’t have to wait for the government to act. The FACE act allows doctors or clinic workers to privately sue the individuals and groups making the threat. And although that’s been challenged on First Amendment grounds, its use has been upheld by the courts in cases where the intent to threaten or intimidate was clear.

The lawyer who represented Planned Parenthood in that case declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the sensitivity surrounding the issues, lack of knowledge of the circumstances of Dr. Tiller’s death and respect for his family. But several lawyers confirmed that the case, last litigated in 2006 when the anti-abortion groups tried to appeal to the Supreme Court, could serve as a model for others.

“It’s very fact-intensive,” said Mahoney, from the National Abortion Foundation. “It really depends on the particular circumstances. We would say that people should not be allowed to threaten anyone for providing legal medical services.” In addition to a private right to sue, state attorneys general can also enforce the law within their states.

Some civil libertarians, however, have concerns. On “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley cautioned against prosecution or lawsuits against even those who promote violence. “We have this difficult line to walk between free speech and preventative law enforcement,” he said. “The Supreme Court has said that violent speech is protected … and it is in fact protected to say all abortion doctors should be killed.”

That’s not necessarily true under the FACE Act, however. The law specifically targets whoever “by force or threat of force … intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with …” anyone who is a provider of abortion services or a patient trying to access them.

That’s not to say that FACE is sufficient or its enforcement is easy. “It’s penalties are significantly lower than many other federal criminal statutes,” said Mahoney, who was involved in criminal prosecutions under FACE in the justice department. The other difficulty, she acknowledged, is the “delicate balance” between protected speech and incitement to violence. While the law does make it a crime to “intimidate or interfere” with provision of abortion services, “there’s a lot of law about what’s a criminally actionable threat” that makes intimidating statements difficult to prosecute. “It’s not so much FACE as that whole body of law that’s the difficulty,” said Mahoney.

Avoiding such politically charged difficulties may be why the federal government appears in recent years to have avoided enforcing the law altogether. The murder of George Tiller, apparently by a known anti-abortion zealot, may begin to change the political equation.