The War On Terror's Blind Spot

When the Atlanta Olympics bomber was caught last year, I posted the following comment here: "There have been five major U.S.-based terror attacks over the past decade: the Unabomber's campaign; the original WTC attack; Oklahoma City; the Olympic pipe-bomb; and finally 9/11. So if you measure by number of high-profile attacks, and not by body count, it's basically a draw right now: two attacks by right-wing nuts, two by Islamic nuts, and one by a radical Luddite. If two attacks are enough to throw hundreds of innocent civilians with suspicious-sounding names into jail for months, what are Ashcroft and Ridge planning for the far right? Fundraisers perhaps?"

This afternoon, I happened to stumble across this story from the Christian Science Monitor: "Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature." As the article goes on to say, there's been almost no national coverage of the case, and the government hasn't even seen fit to hold a press conference to discuss it. I find this incredibly short-sighted and insane. I mean, we've had headlines all this week where the news is literally that someone with a suspicious-sounding name didn't show up for a flight in France. And here we have an actual arms trove and a borderline WMD found in the possession of someone with clear intent to use it -- someone who was discovered because his box of fake DOD and UN badges was sent to the wrong address -- and it's practically a non-event. If Krar's first name had been Abdul instead of William, you can bet Ashcroft would have been giving press conferences from the scene of the arrest.

Of course, if the Bush administration did crack down on right-wing extremist terrorism the way they cracked down on Bin Laden by invading Iraq, it might be a little tricky politically. What would they do, invade Montana?

Comments

[Arthru Rouse]

I'm writing in regard to a different essay you published in the January 2004 issue of Discover, "Internet-Era Democracy." I'm a recent graduate from Pepperdine with an MA in Educational Technology. Many of us in the class of 2003 are interested in the parallels between open source software and grass roots political movements such as the Dean candidacy.

Can you open a blog to discuss this?

[shaun]

But that's only the attacks that have occured on US soil. The majority of terrorist attacks against American targets take place in foreign countries, and those are (as far as I can see) almost exclusively Middle Eastern groups. Considering how much easier it is for right wingers who actually live in the country to carry out attacks, an overwhelming portion of the terror threat to America is from people with names like "Abdul."

[Kristian Dupont]

I'm a bit puzzled with the motives for the war on terror. I can see that you would want to state to the people that action is being taken and thus this initiative. But isn't it a bit short-sighted? I mean, what is it going to end with? Will Bush or anybody ever be able to declare the war "won"? I don't see how. You can never win such a war. And as far as I can tell, declaring a war on terror is in fact the best thing that could happen for the terrorists because it gives them the one thing that they want: attention - and lots of it too!

[McChris]

I agree and the same things happening here in europe, over recent weeks there has been a concerted wave of bombings and parcel bombs by Italian anarchistic groups
http://news.google.com/news?q=anarchist&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&safe=off&sa=N&tab=nn
These have however gone virtualy unreported by the main news media.

Domestic terrorism has always been the biggest threat but its also one of those things that doesn't get talked about - its sad to say that if the recent bombings in europe had been perpetrated by Islamic Extremists rather than anarchists I have no doubt that it would be headline news throughout the world

[Abdul]

Hey! I resent that!

[Sheryl]

I read about all of this a couple of months ago--blogdex is an endless source of info and entertainment--but I was surprised the CNN/MSNBC/FOX news machine didn't jump on the story. It has all of the elements of a perfect non-stop-round-the-clock story: unsuspecting citizen from Staten Island opens his mail and uncovers a terrorist plot. Big guns. Big bombs. Conspiracies. Undercover investigation. But as someone in the CSM article points out, it happened around the time of the start of the war and it was in Texas and how embarrasing for the Bush administration.

Above and beyond that though, is the fact that if one were to consider domestic terrorism a real threat, anyone serious about protecting citizens would be forced to reconsider the gun laws and that would be political suicide. Any US citizen can legally arm himself like something out of an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie and, then, walk down the street and start killing a lot of people in a very short amount of time. Or how about those pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in the back and a bunch of freedom fighters at the trigger. Not very hard for your average militia man to whip up in the garage because owning guns--no matter how big-- is every American's right. I think that's the real reason why we don't hear more about domestic terrorism these days.

The Krar story has been picked up in the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe today, so maybe more attention is on the way.

[Meri]

The only way that we could win the war on terror would be if the government could be sure no one was planning another terror attack or had the resource to execute it. The second is almost impossible to enforce, so we must return to the first. In order to know that no one is planning a terror attack, the government must be able to read (and control) the minds of the entire world population. Very 1984, no?

[sam]

About winning the war on terror, I think 'Get Your War On' said it best (obvious but still funny)...

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html

'Oh my God, this War on Terrorism is gonna *rule*! I can't wait until the war is over and there's no more terrorism!'

'I know! Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War on Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs any more? It'll be just like that!'

[barlow]

Of course, we daily wage a war against kidnapping that sounds no less ironic than the way you folks are presenting the war against terrorism. Imagine, arresting (abducting) people who abduct children! We will never stop kidnapping, but at least we are not subsidizing it by lowering the barriers to entry into such an endeavor. Same with the middle east - we tried doing nothing (or relatively nothing) after the first WTC attack and the discovery of the assassination plot on Bush Sr. by Iraq. Clinton took a few perfunctory actions involving cruise missles, but basically we communicated that you can do pretty much whatever you want to America. The UN's reticence to enforce its own resolutions is another case in point - at what point does an unenforced rule cease to be a rule? While I don't agree with every single aspect of the way the administration presented the case for the war on Iraq, I think, overall, the effect of our actions will be to make us safer, domestically, and to make the costs of waging terror a little higher. I mean, what if the Saudis didn't send a gob of money to suicide bombers in palestine every year? By what percentage would *that* decrease the list of people signing up?

As for reasons the administration didn't advertise the nut in Texas; who knows. I can think of thirty possible reasons that don't involve campaign contributions. Keep in mind that purist weirdos like that consider the Democrats and the Republicans to be nearly identical. They don't care about Bush.

As for FoxNews covering that Texas story, they did discuss it with the author of a book about domestic terrorism:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,106976,00.html

Finally, you guys on the left are using the blur filter too liberally when you try to discern the makeup of the right. We right leaning folk recognize that there are huge differences between the Green Party and the Democrat party, between someone like Marx and someone like Bill Clinton. The fact that you would even put Bush and some crazed domestic terrorist in the same category (as a possible cause celebre of some possible campaign donor) is just ridiculous.

[rainer]

the situation is more different. Bush see only black and white but there are many other colors.

[joe]

And CNN covered it then, too:
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0312/30/ltm.09.html

To say, though that the right-leaning folks see shades of meaning is quite ludicrous: read Coulter's "Treason," in which she says that anyone who disagrees with the right is a traitor. Not a real tolerant view, I'd say. And Rush STILL trots out the libellous saw about the Clintons being involved in death dealing in Arkansas.

[Steph Mineart]

Actually, six major terrorist attacks. You forgot the Anthrax. That was domestic, too.

But your point is well taken.

[Meri]

Barlow, I would concede that you are right. The war on terror will never be over. But it is different from the war on kidnapping (unless that also has very sinister effects). The war on terror has and is being used as an excuse for the US administration to restrict the human and constitutional rights of ITS OWN PEOPLE. This is why I think it is so dangerous to have a never-ending war ... what rights will you have left by the time they are done?

I don't really see this as a political issue, but more a humanitarian one. Where is the democracy for which the USA means to be the saviour? If it is missing in its backyard, how can it bring peace, stability, democracy to Iraq?

[psyco]

Sono con te amico by psyco

[Will]

This is the point that indie record labels have been making for years...
The enemy is within!!! aargh!!

[Jim Kessler]

I thought you may be interested in a column I wrote about the William Krar case for UPI.

Outside View: Who is William Krar?
By Jim Kessler
A UPI Outside View commentary
Published 3/14/2004 2:57 PM
View printer-friendly version
WASHINGTON, March 14 (UPI) -- Since his appointment as attorney general, John Ashcroft's Washington office has issued 2,295 news releases. Not one of them has mentioned the name William Joseph Krar.
Krar's attorney is saying it's all a misunderstanding, and Krar himself is not talking, but his arrest by federal law enforcement in the small town of Noonday, Texas, last April may have stopped the most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11.
Krar, who is affiliated with several anti-government, white supremacist militia organizations, was apprehended after mailing a package containing false U.N. credentials, Defense Intelligence Agency IDs, phony birth certificates and a forged federal concealed weapons permit to a co-conspirator in New Jersey.
The package came with a note that read, "We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands." It did. It was delivered to the incorrect address.
An alert citizen contacted the FBI, which led to the arrest of Krar and the discovery of a mind-numbing weapons cache: fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs, nearly 500,000 rounds of ammunition and enough pure sodium cyanide "to kill everyone inside a 30,000 square foot building," according to federal authorities.
The arrest of Krar and two associates was the talk of the town in little Noonday, Texas, a sleepy community of about 500 people located 100 miles southeast of Dallas. But outside of a few local news stories and a handful of mentions in several national outlets, the William Krar arrest is the proverbial tree that fell in the woods.
Even more astounding is the stony silence from the Ashcroft Justice Department, which found at least 2,295 occasions to toot its own horn that are apparently more newsworthy than the Krar arrest.
"We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how we announce our activities," a Justice Department spokesman told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Really? This is from a Justice Department that averages two news releases every day and has never been shy to march out every triumph over the arrest or conviction of anyone remotely connected to overseas terror.
No, this Justice Department is obsessed with thinking about how they announce their activities. And that is what is so intriguing about this arrest and the conspicuous lack of comment from Ashcroft.
It is, to quote another famous crime fighter, reminiscent of "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time," said Inspector Gregory. "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Is there a double standard at Justice between the public pronouncements over arrests that fit our current stereotype of terrorists and those that don't? It is a question deserving of an answer. As for William Krar and his associates, who knows what they were planning? Perhaps they were going to blow up the United Nations or release sodium cyanide poison in the Pentagon. Perhaps they were ultimately going to do nothing -- just stockpile weapons of mass destruction and pass coded communiqués to each other bemoaning the Zionist occupation of the United States.
We don't know because William Krar is not talking. And neither is the Justice Department.
--
(Jim Kessler is president of the Washington-based consulting firm Definition Strategies. He can be reached at jkessler@defstrat.com.)
--
(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
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[- wonderyak -]

Better an open enemy than a false friend. - wonderyak -