A little research shows that Apple modified tGNUtar o be resource fork aware and, I guess, did the same with BSDtar! Maybe this points to the problem. Certainly there is nothing wrong with the tar files on the site!
bsdtar: Unrecognized archive format: Inappropriate file type or format
bsdtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
I'm not sure what to do if I need a fresh copy of the src. ? Fortunatly I did get an tar file from SourceForge, about a week ago, that seems to behave normally.