Home Grown?

Martin Linstedt, “director of political warfare” for the 7th Missouri Militia, ranted in the same vein: “I’ve been wishing that the A-rabs had stolen a couple hundred jumbo-jets full of Talmudic Khazar-mamzers, criminal regimist whiggers, niggers, gooks, beaners, etc. and crashed them all into the Supreme Kort, CON-gress-kapital J Edgar Hoover FBI Building, all 50 state capitals [sic] — A DAMNED GOOD START!”

Someone’s lost that lovin’ feelin’, I guess.

The fact is, the far right in America is consistently underestimated as a potent force. David Neiwert, a former MSNBC analyst and author of the 1999 book In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement in the Pacific Northwest, believes the Department of Justice and its head, John Ashcroft, simply don’t understand domestic terror, possibly because they’d prefer not to know. “When Ashcroft says the far right isn’t organized, it shows how little he knows about it,” said Neiwert. The fringe right “look to William Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, say, but not for leadership — more as an information clearinghouse.”

Besides, the right wing has a historical fascination with bio-terror, and anthrax in particular. Lancaster, Ohio, microbiologist Larry Wayne Harris serves as a case in point. Harris was arrested in 1998 in Henderson, Nevada, and charged with carrying enough anthrax to “wipe out” Las Vegas. Three years before that, Harris was arrested at his home with three vials of freeze-dried Yersinia pestis, an organism that causes bubonic plague. During that arrest, Ohio police discovered a certificate stating that Harris was a lieutenant in the Aryan Nations, a white-separatist organization founded in prisons and based in Hayden Lake, Idaho.

Terror expert Neiwert points out that the small scale of the anthrax campaign so far seems tailored to the “leaderless resistance” concept espoused by many radical-right organizations. “The concept of which is not unlike [that of] al Qaeda — the idea of individual cells,” Neiwert said. “There could be six or seven people in a terrorist cell with the person who sent it not being the person that made and milled the anthrax itself.”

If that’s the case, then the domestic war on terror could be headed down the same path as the international search for bin Laden — in the words of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”