7 June 2002
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/07/opinion/07KRIS.html
New York Times, June 7, 2002
We Americans have conjured so specific a vision of terrorists — swarthy,
glowering Muslims mumbling fanatically about Allah — that we're missing
the threat from home-grown nuts, people like David Burgert.
Mr. Burgert, a 38-year-old who last made a living renting out snowmobiles
here in this spectacularly beautiful nook of northwestern Montana, had a
terror plan that made Osama bin Laden's look rinky-dink. Not content merely
to kill a few thousand people, Mr. Burgert's nine-member militia was planning
a violent revolution and civil war to overthrow the entire United States
government.
The plan, according to Sheriff James Dupont, was for the militia to use its
machine guns, pipe bombs and 30,000 rounds of ammunition to assassinate 26
local officials (including Mr. Dupont), and then wipe out the National Guard
when it arrived. After the panicked authorities sent in NATO troops, true
American patriots would rise up, a ferocious war would ensue, and the U.S.
would end up back in the hands of white Christians.
"The good thing is that most of the people who would do it are so stupid
that they would kill themselves first," said Sheriff Dupont, who runs the
law here in rugged Flathead County, which is bigger than all of Connecticut
and has lots more grizzly bears.
But the litany of domestic militia plots, failed ones, is still sobering.
In Michigan, militia members planned to bomb two federal buildings. Missourians
planned to attack American military bases, starting with Fort Hood, Tex.,
on a day it opened to tens of thousands of visitors. California militia members
planned to blow up a propane storage facility. Most unnerving, a Florida
militia plotted to destroy a nuclear power plant.
If these were Muslims who were forming militias and exchanging tips for making
nerve gas, then we'd toss them in prison in an instant. But we're distracted
by our own stereotypes, searching for Muslim terrorists in the Philippine
jungle and the Detroit suburbs and forgetting that there are blond, blue-eyed
mad bombers as well. We're making precisely the mistake that the Saudis did
a few years ago: dismissing familiar violent fanatics as kooks.
In fact, militia members and Al Qaeda members are remarkably similar. Both
are galvanized by religious extremism (America's militias overlap with the
Christian Identity movement, which preaches that Jews are the children of
Satan and that people of color are sub-human), both see the United States
government as utterly evil, and both are empowered by the information revolution
that enables them to create networks, recruit disciples and trade recipes
for bio- and chemical weapons.
It would be a mistake to put one's faith in the militias' eternal incompetence.
Jessica Stern of Harvard has written about an anti-government activist named
James Dalton Bell, who earned a
degree in chemistry from M.I.T. and is unquestionably brilliant. By age 14,
he says, "I was studying the isomerization of benzyl thiocyanate to the
isocyanate."
Weren't we all? But Mr. Bell, who is now in jail, is also believed by the
authorities to have manufactured sarin, a nerve gas, in his basement. He
led a chemical attack against an I.R.S. office and wrote an Internet book
called "Assassination Politics," which
outlines a very clever scheme to pay for contract killings of federal officials
with digital cash in a way that preserves anonymity at both ends. There is
also evidence that Mr. Bell talked "hypothetically" of poisoning a city's
water supply.
The things you learn in Montana: According to militia members here, the World
Trade Center attacks were a plot by the Feds to declare an emergency and
abolish the Bill of Rights; the Columbine school shootings were a federal
test of new mind-control technology; a map on a Kix cereal box shows the
occupation zones Americans will be herded into after the United Nations takes
over.
Another thing you learn here is how to deal with grizzlies. Don't be so focused
on a distant moose that you ignore the bear behind you. And if it charges,
stand your ground until it's 10 feet away, then shoot pepper spray into its
eyes, and — very quickly — step aside.
Right now, I'm afraid that the Bush administration is so focused on the distant
moose that we're oblivious to the local grizzlies like Dave Burgert creeping
up on us.