You dems have got the blues... while the South's got the kooks:
Posted 11/14/2004 11:12 PM
Domestic terrorism: New trouble at home
By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
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'Black helicopter' crowd
During the 1990s, anti-government groups sprang up all over the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism and now monitors hate groups. Many formed militias to prepare for large-scale resistance to the government, which the groups blamed for the Randy Weaver siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and the Branch Davidian confrontation in Waco, Texas, in 1993.
Many of these group members believed the federal government was secretly setting up concentration camps for dissident Americans and was planning a takeover of the United States by United Nations troops as part of a "new world order." Many also said that mysterious black helicopters were conducting surveillance in the West, according to the ADL.
"The 'black helicopter' crowd is still out there," says Wisconsin federal prosecutor Tim O'Shea, referring to extremists who distrust and abhor the federal government.
Potok says the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 751 hate groups last year, a 6% increase over the 708 such organizations it counted in 2002.
Mark Pitcavage, director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League, says incidents of domestic terrorism often don't get much media coverage beyond the local areas where they occur. He says he was surprised that the Krar case did not get wider attention. "This was the only case in U.S. history where we had a person in the U.S. building an actual chemical weapon," he says.
He cites two other cases. In 1997, militia members gathered in central Texas allegedly to plan to attack a military base on Independence Day. They were arrested the morning of July 4 near Fort Hood. Three years later, he says, three heavily armed people described by federal investigators as anti-government extremists shot down a California Highway Patrol helicopter near the California-Nevada border during a standoff with police.
Potok, director of the center's Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups, says, "I don't mean to minimize the work of groups with ties to al-Qaeda. Obviously, there's a huge external threat as well. But there's a tendency to want to externalize the threat and say the people who want to hurt us don't look like us, they don't worship the same god and don't have the same skin color."
Earlier this year, the National District Attorneys Association, which has about 7,000 members, held a first-ever conference on domestic terrorism in Washington, D.C., to help local prosecutors identify potential terrorist groups.
"It was very well received," says the association's vice president, Robert Honecker, a prosecutor in Monmouth County, N.J. "They were appreciative of getting the information and the knowledge so they would be prepared should something happen in their jurisdiction."
Man sought nuclear materials
Some of the alleged efforts by domestic terrorists are chilling.
According to an FBI affidavit in the Tennessee case, Crocker had inquired last spring about where he could obtain nuclear waste or nuclear materials. An informant told the FBI that Crocker, who had "absolute hatred" for the government, wanted "to build a bomb to be detonated at a government building, particularly a courthouse, either federal or state."
In September, according to the affidavit, Crocker told an undercover FBI agent "it would be a good thing if somebody could detonate some sort of weapon of mass destruction in Washington, D.C.," while both houses of Congress "were in session." Crocker allegedly told the agent he admired Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. He said "establishing a concentration camp for Jewish insurance executives would be a desirable endeavor."
Crocker later bought what he thought was Sarin nerve gas and a block of C-4 explosive from the undercover agent, the affidavit says.
Authorities arrested Crocker last month. Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League says such arrests thwart possible attacks and show that U.S. law enforcement is effectively fighting domestic terrorism.
"One of the measures of this is that the number of people arrested for (plotting) terrorist acts is far greater than the number of people arrested for carrying out such attacks. So we're arresting them before they can carry out these acts, which is very important. 9/11 raised awareness generally among law enforcement."
Contributing: Kevin Johnson in Washington
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